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New Internet Speed Record
Himanshu writes "Researchers have set a new data transmission record over the Internet2's high-speed backbone.
The new record announced Tuesday at the Spring 2004 Internet2 member meeting in Arlington, Va., was for transmitting data over nearly 11,000 kilometers at an average speed of 6.25 gigabits per second. This is nearly 10,000 times faster than a typical home broadband connection. The network link used to set the record spans from Los Angeles to Geneva, Switzerland."
Where do I sign up?
This brings a whole new meaning to "Downloading the Internet".
Finally, the Internet will be able to compete on a level playing field in terms of bandwidth with carrier pigeons. :)
--- JRJ
jrjBlog
"Recent studies by the U.S. Department of Energy have shown that researchers in high-energy physics, astrophysics, fusion energy, climatology, bioinformatics and other fields will require networks in the terabit-per-second range within the next decade."... and games as well..
If that happens, imagine the DDoS power from a group of infected Windows boxes.
Striking fear in the authors of godawful fanfiction, I am here, appearing in darkness, Tuxedo Jack!
Thats great.
Now I can get my VIagra and Nigeria investments sent to me a lot faster!
Oh Goody!
When can I fax myself from LA to Switzerland then? Do we have that collapsiter grid done yet?
In order to carry the immense increasing volume of spam...
Heh, a nice pipe to download linux ISO images with bittorrent.
You could download something that fast, but do you have a storage unit fast enough to write that fast and large enough to all that pr0n? Hmmmm.... now if you can, that would be uber sweet :-)
I bet they probably hit their undocumented bandwidth usage limit and will be getting a nasty letter from their service provider telling them to knock it off! :)
I could fill my 250 gig drive with pr0n in 3 seconds!
Be who you are and say what you feel, because the people who mind don't matter, and the people who matter don't mind.
... but you have to have equipment capable of handling it. I know that there's certainly not anything existing that could make full use of a pipe that big... so I think everyone should keep their porn fantasies in check.
I can't see it in the story, how many wires/fiber pairs were used?
If it was a single pair, then DAAAAAAAMN...
I don't suffer from insanity, I enjoy every minute of it!
Less than 10 years?
-Tru
How many Libraries of Congress per second is it?
The truth about Scientology, Xenu, and you: Operation Clambake
What's really impressive about this is is that one third of that was spam.
Now I can transfer my life savings from my bank in LA to my private Swiss bank account in .00000000001 seconds!
Next item on the palm pilot....
Proudly supporting the Libertarian Party.
Is anyone offering dial-up and shells for Internet2? I'm tired of the Internet1.
“Common sense is not so common.” — Voltaire
Why cannot the Internet be one giant LAN. Why do we have to have differemt speed networks, depending upon how much you can pay?
That way we could all have a 100mbps internet connection.
pushing the latest bootleg of kill-bill 2.. Nothing to see here, move along.
or Internet++
Uncompressed 1080i HDTV in RGB takes up about 1.4 Gbps. Where do I sign up :D
Yes, Jack Valenti, not only does this mean more downloading of pirated movies, it brings us closer to the day when the average 13-year old with an average computer will be able to download all of Hollywood in less than 45 minutes. Sleep while you can, Jack.
Don't blame Durga. I voted for Centauri.
That's over 66000 reloads of the front page every second.
Yes, I'm ignoring the obvious latency, but we can only dream.
well it's great that i can download so fast.. but current storage units can't write and read so fast right? I mean looking at the standard 7200 rpm disk which write and read at say, 100MB/s, how would the disk handle the download speeds? And surely we can't jam everything in memory???
None. Internet2 is for research and government institutions so that they don't have to deal with what they lovingly call "commodity traffic."
Don't expect these types of speed on the Internet or for consumer use.
The network link used to set the record spans from Los Angeles to Geneva, Switzerland
In other words, 2 of the, what, 1000?, 2000?, 10000? nodes on internet2 have exchange data super-fast.
Well okay, but I'm sure if you reduce the number of internet1-connected computers to the same number, you'll get really really good results too.
Comparing a semi-experimental network to a mature, heavily used one, is like comparing apples and oranges, and therefore I smell marketting under this speed record announcement.
"A door is what a dog is perpetually on the wrong side of" - Ogden Nash
If someone actually developing real-time applications to make use of this bandwidth? I know there ARE uses for such high bandwidth, but really, what is it being used for?
Oh wait, the link starts around San Fernando. My bad.
What the heck is a 'sig'?
is how many seconds until it's slashdotted.
I could fill my 250 gig drive with pr0n in 3 seconds!
Really? Hmm... the connection ran at 6.25Gbps. That's roughly 750MBps. At that speed it would take about 330 seconds, or 5.5 minutes to fill up your HD. Of course, there are some other problems as well (HD speed, etc).
Casual Games/Downloads
In Soviet Russia, the internet downloads YOU.
(couldn't help it...I haven't seen any good ones recently)
"This is nearly 10,000 times faster than a typical home broadband connection."
However for $19.99 you can get unlimited dial-up access on Internet2 which is only 5000 times faster than a typical home broadband connection.
What they failed to say was the information they sent was a "great deal" for penis enhancements.
"All great truths begin as blasphemies." -George Bernard Shaw
But what is the latency??
:D
My Team Fortress Classic only uses small packets, but I want them back in 20ms!
HSHS
Seriously, though - is there a better latency?
He Schutze, He Scores!
At these speeds, there is no need for the last D in DVD.
My beliefs do not require that you agree with them.
10,000 times faster than the average broadband connection, but even the article states that that kind of bandwidth is not useful to home users yet. Then why mention it? How about this:
This new transmission is 2,796,206 times faster than a 2400 baud modem!
That's an equally useless comparison but at least the number is higher. You don't get to see a useful comparison figure until the 3rd paragraph where it says that the previous record was 4GB/second. They really should first and foremost tout the 36% increase in speed over the previous record. That's pretty impressive.
> Just think of how much pr0n you could download with a pipe like that.
If your pipe was that big, you wouldn't _need_ porn.
Norman Cook's Ode to Sl
Why can't there be a +1 Bloody Scary mod?
10Mbit/sec Ethernet has been around since, what, 1980 and is still 20 times faster than my ADSL line, so I expect we'll all be flying around in our personal jet packs first...
I mean, my laptop can only do Gigabit Ethernet. Will all of that data just kind of smush up on the other side of the wall until it bursts the wire?
I have misplaced my pants.
Judging by the rate of increase in my broadband connection's speed over the last 5 years, it'll be about 5 or 6 thousand years before it catches up to these speeds.
Free yourself. Everything else will follow.
how did they do this? fiber optic? satellite? quantum singlarity?
who paid for this? government grants? private sponsorship? ice weasels?
who benefits from this? physics professors? lonely college students? pay per view movie download web sites?
can this technology be brought to individuals and businesses? yes? no? maybe?
what crappy reporting on such an interesting topic.
Wonder if it's faster than loading up a cargo plane with a few hundred TB of hard drives and flying it over?
Cool! A Kill Bill bootleg!!!!
Send it to me, too!
I have misplaced my pants.
Microsoft calls it Internet#
"A door is what a dog is perpetually on the wrong side of" - Ogden Nash
Now we can Slashdot websites even FASTER!
You won't see this in a home connection anytime soon, but you might see it within networks or between other backbones.
In the end, it can directly benefit the home user due to the fact that the overall bandwidth is increased, meaning that you and everyone on a backbone don't get bogged down by the 50% that are downloading/spamming/etc at higher-than-average speeds.
Oops, I had the decimal place wrong, it isn't 625, it's 6.25 Gbps. Must be time to clean my glasses!
And yes, even then, the hard drive only can write at a fraction of that speed.
I wonder if the technology exists for switching at that rate? Stuffing bits into one end and pulling them out at the other is much simpler than having to examine headers (or god forbid, the payload as well) before sending a packet to the correct interface.
Be who you are and say what you feel, because the people who mind don't matter, and the people who matter don't mind.
slashdotted... yet!
If you mod me down, I *will* introduce you to my sister!
How about calling it Internet Xtreme... I swear I don't work for an ad agency.
With a little experimenting, I found that 7 DVDs stack to a height of exactly 1 cm. The diameter of a dVD is 12 cm (radius = .06).
.01 = .0000161 cubic meters
.0000161 cubic meters/dvd = 140061.6601 DVDs
Volume of a DVD = pi * r^2 * h = 3.141 * (.06)^2 * 1/7 *
The volume of a large SUV:
"With rear seats folded 5-pass: 86.2, 7-pass: 79.9"
79 cubic feet is 2.26251604 cubic meters
2.26251604 cubic meters /
4.37 gigs / DVD * 140061.6601 DVDs = 612069.4546 gigs in one carload
Throughput speed = Data / (setup time + transmit time)
Assume a one-way transmission, one mile down the road. Assume the DVDs are packed in such a way so that loading the time spent loading the van is negigible (they're boxed well). Therefore, setup time ~= 0. Assume the van drives at an average speed of 60 mph.
1 mile / 60 mph = 60 seconds
612069.4546 gigs / 60 seconds = 10201.15758 gigs / second.
10201 >> 6.5 gigs per second. Sneakernet wins.
To make laws that man cannot, and will not obey, serves to bring all law into contempt.
--E.C. Stanton
6 GB/s downloads...but still only 128kb/s uploads...
"Music is everybody's possession. It's only publishers who think that people own it." - John Lennon.
As some have pointed out.. what does it matter if all the computers on the net us N megabits per second or M megabits per second? Now, if one of those computers from the future (with all that bandwidth) could travel back in time (or just blast its packets into the past), then it could DOS the all-fuck out of people. Now, if something about this new bandwidth technology (no I did not RTFAMFer) gives massive upload increases with relatively little download increase, then you'd have a problem. As it stands, upload bandwidth is generally less than download bandwidth.
p
This is the kind of connection you'd want to allow people to download from you.
I'd not look to download too much from it, since it'd be hard to find anything out there that can push data to you fast enough.
You might be able to get BFV to run smoothly with 64 players, though.
Z
The Chronic *WHAT* les of Narnia!
They were sued by the RIAA after it was determined their DHCP obtained IP address was responsible for sharing 300 Britney Spears MP3's.
Repant. Thy end is sheer.
I followed the link to internet 2 and found the answer to my own question... the record was set in both the Single and Multiple Stream categories.
(taken from http://lsr.internet2.edu/)
IPv6 Category
Single Stream Class: 46,156 terabit-meters per second by a team consisting of members from the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) and CERN across 10,949 kilometers of network.
Multiple Stream Class: 46,156 terabit-meters per second by a team consisting of members from the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) and CERN across 10,949 kilometers of network.
IPv4 Category
Single Stream Class: 61,752 terabit-meters per second by a team consisting of members from the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) and CERN across 10,949 kilometers of network.
Multiple Stream Class: 68,431 terabit-meters per second by a team consisting of members from the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) and CERN across 10,949 kilometers of network.
Be who you are and say what you feel, because the people who mind don't matter, and the people who matter don't mind.
...RIAA lawsuit?
Help cure AIDS, cancer, and more. Donate your unused computer time to worldcommunitygrid.org. Join Team Slashdot!
hmm..
eInternet Xtreme?
eieieieInternet Extrememreoasdk?
MY BALLS ARE BURNING!
I've given up on "Post Anonymously"
Casual Games/Downloads
1. Who's driving the SUV?
2. Loading time is negligible? Nope. Try loading an SUV full of anything. It takes time.
3. Where didja get all of those DVD's? Spent the last 3 months burning them?
Just some thoughts. While a high speed network is expensive, just getting all of this together (to move an SUVload of DVD's down the road) probably costs more, especially long term.
Karnal
According to the site, the LoC contains:
These are quick & dirty, back-of-the-napkin estimates:
Book/Manuscripts: (300 pp. x 500 words/page x 8 bytes/word) = ~2MB
Recording: (300 sec x 176,400 bytes/sec) = ~60MB
Photograph: 500KB (2k x 2k, jpeg q=0.8 ??)
Maps: Uhh? Vector? Raster? Hmm, lets say ~10MB?
So... throwing all those numbers together, I come out with roughly...
Oh, let's call it 250 Terabytes. (or 2 Petabits).
At only 6.25 Gb/s that works out to 320,000s, or...
only 3.7 days/LoC
Clearly, more improvement is needed... (and maybe bzip2 would help?)
Maybe you need the Einstein probe to cool them.
A highlight:
"To ensure accuracy, the balls must be kept chilled to near absolute zero, inside the largest vacuum flask ever flown in space and isolated from any disturbances in the quietest environment ever produced".
The owls are not what they seem
on a typical PC, writing out a 650 Meg ISO to disk. It'd take hardly any time at all, but during that time, your system would be completely unresponsive.
It's sad to see that PC hardware has to play catch-up to the amount of bandwidth, or will have to soon at least.
it can withstand a /.ing
Figure this, your latency should decrease since there will be less bottlenecking. (Unless some new application comes along that can hog all the bandwidth) As soon as a router gets your little bitty baby packet, it'll just pop it right along to the next router. Your latency will be determined by the speed of light, I guess, and the path the packet takes to its destination.
p
I think a SUV full of hard drives would be better. Higher density and you don't have the the send-side DVD-write time and the receive-side DVD-read time to contend with.
It's somewhat specious to talk about bandwidth without taking into account the computers at either end...
-h3
Circles don't tesselate, so the actual figure will be a little lower.
Why the hell am I posting this?
...bandwidth?
Mother, do you think they'll like this sig?
You could argue for 'speed' being accurate enough. One bit is the unit of distance and one second is the unit of time. Think of it as traveling along bits.
though, bandwidth just makes much more sense.. you win.
Here's your answer:
Internet 2
If you are wondering, "hrm, am *i* on intarwebs 2?"...most likely, no, but they have a tool to check for you, just nab it and try.
We use it heavily on campus and are quite active in the Access Grid. Great stuff.
How about calling it the Lorld Lide Leb then, if it'll piss Microsoft off?
...I can get reasonably priced bandwidth? I'm too far from a CO to get [A]DSL, the houses are strung out far enough that the cable companies have never run cable through, so I'm stuck on a dial-up line running over copper twice as old as I am. It's pretty good copper, though, as long as the Verizon guys get the tap boxes shut good after working on them. I digress, though.
My problem doesn't seem that different from many others. The only way I will be able to get any sort of bandwidth is to drag it kicking and screaming at a very high cost. As the technology of high-bandwidth connections proliferates into wide use in backbones, can any of us expect the price of bandwidth to drop into affordibility or should we not hold our breath and expect telcos to keep their strangle-hold on old analog lines? Can we expect this sort of technology to lower the cost of Fiber-to-the-Home (FTTH) that Verizon has pleged to install? Or will this glut of bandwidth be let out drop by drop by telcos to squeeze every last penny out of the folks who crave bandwidth, progress be damned?
Just a thought.
I don't see a plug for the router vendor. Is it Cisco, Juniper, other?
--Brian
Check out Access Grid for at least one reason that we may end up needing all of that pipline. Imagine for a second if you will everyone having a personal AG node...you can pump out 5-6MB/s without *doing* much of anything. Our campus bandwidth (which is Internet2 enabled) would be shot with less than 20 people. Imagine what we'd need if all 15,000 needed 5-6MB/s all the time?
Sounds far fetched, but then again a great many things sound "far fetched" when considered before their coming.
We'll need pipelines that big and bigger...just you wait!
At 6.25Gb/s, about 6 seconds. I can hear MPAA quaking in their boots. Or, if you prefer, you could stream about 600 DVDs simultaneously. *drool*
Yes... it's a SLOW day at work today. Blah...
Man you deserve to be modded up simply for the use of the word "wormii". Or should I say "uuse"?
SYS 64738 NO CARRIER
In early 1994, I introduced the concept of the "Porn Barrier" as a way to measure bandwidth.
The Porn Barrier is breached when a home broadband connection can download porn faster than you consume it.
For many people, a simple broadband connection has already passed their Porn Barrier, and I congratulate them.
However, after years of caffiene, video games, and desensitation via usenet and other sources, my personal Porn Barrier is still well beyond current home bandwidth availability.
This article gives me hope that one day, I too shall know the joys of passing my own Porn Barrier in the privacy of my own home.
Maybe then I can finally put that regretful day in the campus computer lab behind me, aside from the fact that I'm legally required to register when I move so that the police can notify my neighbors.
The future is bright!
I'm in San Jose, CA and can't even get broadband!!!
wtf does Digital Versatile mean?
A rabbit in the hand is worth 4 in the cage
I was positive it was called The Internet: Reloaded
Try connecting San Jose, California, to Reston, Virginia, with 100Mbps Ethernet and let us know how that goes.
Can I bum a sig? I left mine at the office.
If, say, you were downloading a 20GB file...would the hard drive even be able to keep up with 6.5 gigabits a second? What does that translate to in megabytes?
This is also the first time a Windows Server has won in the Internet2 competition:m l
http://lsr.internet2.edu/history.ht
"quit pinging Geneva-- the fuel cost is over $400,000 per packet"
If a job's not worth doing, it's not worth doing right.
nope - same problem with ./ ...
some other guys always posts what you want to say - just this time we both came together ---- !!!!
If you want to get a little more background, there's also the eWEEK.com story. Always good to have more than a single source. Especially when one of them is CNet.
I heard Mr. Robertson is going to call it LInternet.
Am I the only one who picked up on this? They portray this as a test of a standard IPv4 file transfer. They are only half correct. While I don't doubt they used IPv4, they certainly didn't utilize standard TCP which their implications of this being similar to other transmissions (unlike the IPv6 test performed earlier) is way off base.
For example, if this test were performed with TCP, the largest TCP window size is 64K. Since TCP transfers must have an ack every window, you can only send 64KB in the amount of time that light travels the 11,000,000 m and back through fiber cable.
Some basic information:
d = 11,000,000 m (each direction)
c = 199,861,638 m/s (in glass / fiber)
W = 65536Bytes (TCP Window Size in Bytes)
The theoretical bandwidth for a transfer over this distance using TCP window sizes:
bw = (W * 8 bits/Byte) / ((2d)/c)
bw = 4.763Mb/s
So basically they had to use something like a UDP file transfer. While this is not an uncommon thing, it certainly isn't anything as "typical" as it's made to sound.
You would still get lamers shouting LAAAaaagggggg...
"Within minutes of breaking the Internet speed record the elated researchers moved their entire DivX collection into a mysterious folder titled 'My Shared Folder', and began slapping high fives."
"When asked to explain their actions, the researchers only comment was 'Free pr0n!! Free pr0n!!' The exact meaning of this phrase is not yet known. -AP"
------ The best brain training is now totally free : )
At 6.25Gb/s, about 6 seconds. I can hear MPAA quaking in their boots. Or, if you prefer, you could stream about 600 DVDs simultaneously. *drool*
Alas, even RAM-based SAN devices can't keep up with that bandwidth by half. Time to use latency of network loops as a storage mechanism. =)
10201 >> 6.5 gigs per second. Sneakernet wins.
They reached 6.25 gigaBITS not gigabytes... which is around 750 megabytes/sec
but yeah. 10TB/sec is still > 750MB/sec
They will reach those speeds when people realize that they and their neighbors can create a company to provide them with exactly the service they want. Community based FTTH is providing 10Mbit connections to thousands of locations for $15-$30 per month. With a static IP.
Fuck the corporate world. Communal internet is the future.
I'm in the hole of the broadband donut.
RTFA, follow the links. Are you still as excited? Is it time for your hyporcisy to kick in?
This is nearly 10,000 times faster than a typical home broadband connection.
:)
Pfft you haven't seen MY home broadband connection!
Matt
You have 1 Moderator Point! Use it or lose it! Is that a threat? -vapid
It was, (you understood) dickbag. ;P
Un-news
Can you stream porn with it?
The Internet2 Detective is a small binary that will check to see if your host is connected to Internet2.
http://detective.internet2.edu/
Shouldn't that be 11Mm?
RTFA, follow the links. Are you still as excited? Is it time for your hyporcisy to kick in?
Which has shit little to do with the network, nicht wahr? Do routers, switches, etc run that OS? No. Wait, maybe an engineer who developed the fiber optics used Windows 2000 to check his e-mail once! Yay! This proves superiority without a doubt!
Comparing it to Windows will be a moot point, since El Dorado is going to have a 40% larger code base than XP.
While I applaud your use of a bunch of crazy symbols that a mere mortal such as myself will never understand, you seem to have missed one very important statement:
;-)
"The network link used to set the record spans from Los Angeles to Geneva, Switzerland.
You didn't factor in distance, just raw speed. Your SUV may be able to slightly beat the I2 record in Gb/s, but I'm thinking that the packets would reach Switzerland long before your vehicle.
Kinda like calculating the length of the Kessel Run in Parsecs... oh, wait...
Your calculations are obsolete.
Recount with 8.5Gb for dobule layer dvds.
Yeah and what about pi? 3.141 is not accurate enough! See this post.
Yes, a small binary that requires a 232 MB download from Windows Update to get the .NET framework required to run it.
How irritating.
how much of this is the hardware(fiber, etc) used and how much is the modified protocols?
I wonder if the home users and general internet will ever upgrade to improved TCP version that allow for better utilization of broadband connections.
Why post this as an "Internet speed record" when obviously this is not the same thing as an Internet2 speed record. I'm much less impressed with the speed of some semi-private network that most of us will never have anything to do with. Speed up the Internet for the rest of us, and you'll have story.
8 bytes/word Everyone knows that a word is 32 bits (or 4 bytes)
(this is assuming that you're using a 32-bit computer) Sorry, old geek moment.
For some reason their TCP connection kept resetting.
mike:~# apt-get install internet2
Reading Package Lists... Done
Building Dependency Tree... Done
E: Couldn't find package internet2
Is it in the unstable branch?
-Pat
It was a rhetorical question, just restating the point in the form of a question...Anonymous Coward.
Post it here in a reply! T4at wood b gr3a+, dood!
I have misplaced my pants.
You poor suckers without FTTH.
:D
100Mbps Up, 100Mbps Down.
No transfer caps.
US$60/month.
No shit.
Damn, life is GOOD!
Some people are like slinkies--basically useless but they bring a smile to your face when pushed down the stairs.
According to a Lufthansa itinerary I looked up on the web, the trip can be made in 12 hours and 25 minutes with a short layover in Frankfurt. This would require about 4000 DVDs to beat the posted bandwidth. This, of course, doesn't take into account time to burn the DVDs.
Language students: Don't try to learn English here. This ain't it.
Congratulations, you confused bits and bytes.
Yeah, but can you hook up a Commodore 64 to it?
"Simple words such as 'better' or 'faster' are best used by simpletons. Life [...] is more complicated." - TMC
On 0 punch cards.
It's crazy to think that the speed they are getting of approx. 800 MB per sec transfering from LA to Europe is faster than the effective bandwith of PC133 RAM to the CPU.
The majority of the computers in this world are probably using PC133 RAM.
kd
A distinctive mark, characteristic, or sound indicating identity
Congratulations, you confused bits and bytes.
Doh.
(Don't ask me why it merited "Interesting", even ignoring that error.)
Would they allow that as carry-on, or would I have to check that?